First of all, don’t EVER trust anyone who calls you about anything financial who you did not exclusively and directly solicit information from. The credible financial instutitions are no longer marketing their products and services over the phone–that is a dead and decaying path of advertisting value. The big dogs are primarily on the Internet but they also rely heavily on the interruption marketing venues of television and radio.

We all know that advertising is a compendium of liars (and, sometimes outright immoral thieves–Seth Godin, the guru of permission marketing has titled his latest book All Marketers are Liars). But here’s a perfect example of why you can’t believe shit that you hear over the phone.

I just had some chick call me from “Discover Card” about my low balance transfer rate that was effective up until November, 2005 for a 4.9% transfer rate.

She then asked if I had any card balances I’d like to transfer today.

I told her that 4.9% was a pretty good rate (even though it’s not–you should be able to get a 0% balance transfer rate for about a year) and that I would have to look through my papers.

She then asked if she could call me back in a couple weeks to see if I was ready. And here comes the killer mistake she made…

She asked me for my phone number!!!

First of all, she was the one who called me and if she was really with Discover Card she would have had my phone number. So, I said, “Yeah. Just call me back at this number.”

She persisted, “And, what is your number?”

And I said, “It’s the same number attached to my account, the same one you called me at today.”

She say, “Thank you;” I hang up. [I will reserve a free copy of my forthcoming e-Book Flipping the Temple: Win the Information War by Using the Internet to Achieve Fantastic Success as an Author. [MINTON CHALLENGE: Bonus points to anyone who can tell me what sitcom and episode this statement comes from]. E-mail me at josh@joshuaminton.com with your guess.

But I digress…

My guess is that these are some of the dolts behind the recent huge identify thefts related to financial information. The people who are stealing these aren’t the crack dealers on the street corner–and they aren’t Al Quaida either. There may have been schemes involving identity theft of financial information prior to their opening salvos in The Ongoing Global War on Terror but they are lucky if they can find good toilet paper or, if they’re in our country–they are watching every angle of their asses and are losing perspective big time.

The FBI is no joke when it comes to crawling up asses and bless them for it because they are cracking these domestic terrorist fuckers’ skulls, man–hunting them down like the Predator going after Governor Jesse the Body. And this ability to clean house is an invaluable tool of civil defense but there are definitions and game rules that must be discussed in an open forum right now. As a society, we need to know where the Nietzschean Line is where you cross over from righteously fighting a demon to becoming one far worse than your opponent.

I’m all for lining suspects up who are crossing our border or flying over our skies and, if someone happens to fit the profile of 99% of all domestic terrorists, I’m sorry but you’re getting lined up. I may be on the plane five minutes before you are and all lounged out in my seat but this relatively minor inconvenience to you is the price of my civil security and I’m willing to endorse collective power to make you pay that price of inconvenience until the bad guys are all caught. But I want to caution once again here that we ensure that is We the People who write the definition of who the bad guys and not the career politicians and generals.

Don’t get me started…

The whole point in writing this blog is to say that the recent identity thefts were performed by disgruntled employees who had the systems knowledge and process awareness to take advantage of serious security gaps in the company. This is exactly the kind of shit that gets the dumb government’s attention as a potential source of wasting tax payers’ time to justify it’s enormously large operating budget when, in reality, the government should be staffed with temporary lawyers, doctors, educators and military leaders instead of career politicians hell bent on sucking the bone long after the marrow has run dry.

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